More Photos from Daigo-ji

Here are more photos of the temple festival.

Godairikison Nonno-e, A Strength Competition

(Note: Some photos for this segment are in the next one.)

Kyoto has more than 2000 temples, and temples have festivals. So it’s possible to go to a temple festival almost any day of the week, though, after you’ve been to a few, you may reasonably ask, “What for?” We’ve been to a few. Here’s a description of one we missed: “During this send-off ceremony for old needles, professional seamstresses and housewives stick their used needles in a slab of konnyaku, a rubbery food made from the starch of a plant root; prayers are then said over them.” I’m not kidding.

However: Spring weather arrived in Kyoto on Friday, and we wanted an outing. The Kyoto Visitors Guide informed us that we could witness “a spectacular competition” beginning at noon at Daigo-ji (Temple). So off we set. The temple sits low in the eastern hills in a neighborhood we hadn’t visited before. As we exited the subway station, men thrust flyers at us advertising bus rides to the temple, but we chose to walk. A block or two before the temple grounds, barriers closed the streets to vehicular traffic, and dozens of police officers directed pedestrian hordes. This was obviously a big deal!

Beginning just inside the main temple entrance, booths selling fast food, pickles or sweets packaged to go, and cheap toys lined both sides of the path. From further uphill, we heard chanting of deep voices and saw huge billows of smoke. As we moved in that direction, food booths gave way to amulet stalls, and incense burned our noses. Turning a corner, we found ourselves in a large crowded courtyard that had, at its center, a raised platform resembling a boxing ring. Many men filled it: Buddhist monks in purple, gold or white robes were conducting a raffle to determine the order in which the other men, the contestants, would perform a weight-lifting feat.

What weight-lifting feat? What were they to do? Well….The contestants were to raise and hold off the platform 150 kilograms of pounded glutinous rice called mochi. Mochi is used to make pastries, often filled with sweet bean paste, delicious to some, sickening to others. But as heft in a weight-lifting competition? Pul-ease!

150 kilograms is impressive weight (330 lbs.), and we were anxious to see how lifting would be done and how long someone could really hold this much weight off the floor. But just before the first contestant approached, media were invited onto the platform. Cameramen (yes, men) and their assistants swarmed, and any notion of a mere attendee seeing anything disappeared. We circled the area, we moved forward, we moved backward, but all we could see were cameras and the butt of the judge who was making sure the pallet of mochi was off the floor. My best photos are above. In one, you can probably see the contestant who held the weight for 5 minutes, 23 seconds (the winning time was more than 12 minutes); the other shows the demonstration mochi cakes provided by corporate sponsors and the attitudes of some attendees. One of the demonstration cakes was set aside for people to touch, then touch themselves on the shoulder for good luck.

When we gave up trying to see anything at the mochi-lifting competition, we moved on to the bonfire. Here, there was primitive sounding music. (See the photo for the instruments.) People brought the amulets they had purchased (still wrapped in the bags provided by the temple so that the monks knew the temple had made money) to be blessed by the smoke of the fire. They handed their packages to the monks who held them over the fire briefly before returning them. This was, at least, wonderful pageantry—much better viewing than the mochi competition.

There was one more great treat for us here. Daigo-ji’s pagoda is the oldest building in Kyoto, and it is stunning. (See photo.) I often grumble about how all temples look pretty much alike, and “you’ve seen one temple, you’ve seen them all,” but this building truly is special. That’s why I’ll keep going to temple festivals.

Kyoto Miscellany (2)

Sound trucks: One of the (remarkably few) totally annoying things about living in Japan is some of the noise—not the generic traffic noise of a city or the conversation of folks in the street, which is quite normal for urbanites. In fact, Kyoto city streets are very quiet, except for the occasional badly muffled motorcycle, because hardly anyone ever honks a horn or even rings a bicycle bell. I am referring to the intentional noise made by sound trucks. We have a few small business trucks that come through the ‘hood regularly, and one of them, the cardboard-box guy in his old pick-up, incongruously but loudly plays a tinkly synthesizer version of “The Last Rose of Summer,” over and over and over, with a high-pitched female voice announcing his presence and his mission, over and over and over, early in the morning. In contrast, the vendor of roasted sweet potatoes, who comes around mid-evening, actually enunciates his own “Yaki-imo! Yaki-imo!” call, which is kind of comforting until the 50th or 60th repetition. Much worse, the political parties equip little mini-vans (REALLY little, about the size of a well-fed St. Bernard) with extra batteries and huge sound systems and send them through the narrow residential streets, blaring out their agit-prop at high volume—nothing quite so persuasive as a poorly-modulated recorded voice, at 8:30 a.m., yelling, “I’m Hiroshi Sato, candidate for this district from the Japan Communist Party, and I’m here to tell you….!!!”
The most menacing version comes not from the left but from the far right wing of Japanese politics, where fascism, religious (Emperor-worship) fanaticism, big business, and the yakuza underworld meet. We’ve only seen one of their sound trucks, but it was a full-scale, Greyhound-sized bus, painted black, with pro-Emperor long-live-Great-Japan slogans plastered all over it, rolling toward some political rally with retro-1930s ultranationalist speechification splashing out of its giant speakers. Wow. When these guys locate an enemy, they can use these monsters to devastating effect. In one case I know from the late 1980s, they targeted a city mayor who had made some comments about the Emperor’s responsibility for the war—they surrounded his house and his office with sound trucks, and went at him 24/7, at full blast. It would have gone on forever, I suppose, but finally one of the right-wingers took mercy on their poor victim and shot him. He survived, barely, but only because the perps decided it would have been cruel to the other patients to surround the hospital with sound trucks.

Hot springs: One of the most wonderful things about living in Japan derives from the islands’ continuing geo-history—these are still volcanic islands, so it’s mighty hot underground, and where water comes to the surface, it can be very hot water, filled with minerals leached (or borrowed or boiled) from the earth. This happens everywhere, so it’s hard to escape from soaking one’s body in naturally hot water, cooled to a tolerable 103-105 degrees. Bummer, huh? The spas (called onsen in Japanese) range from local working folks’ after-hours wash-and-soaks to high-end resorts with beautifully appointed guest houses and fabulous meals laid on. They all follow pretty much the same rules—they provide the baths, usually large enough to accommodate a bunch of folks and always (since the arrival of the 19th c. missionaries) segregated by sex. Near the big tubs (whether indoors or outdoors, and many places have both) the customer finds hand-held showers, sinks, mirrors, and (usually) soap and shampoo and other cleansers. So you get naked (put your stuff in a locker and put the key around your wrist), except for a small towel (held decorously in front of you), find yourself a shower-spot, and sit on a small stool in front of your mirror. There you perform your ablutions—wash, shampoo, condition, shave, whatever pleases you—and rinse very well. THEN you get into the tub and soak to your heart’s content. The small towel, which is what you’ve used as a washcloth and then rinsed and wrung out, either goes to the side of the tub or, if you’re male, it can be folded up and put on top of your head. At ordinary places, you soak a while, then get out and dry yourself with the same small towel (which is, of course, already wet), go back out to your locker, dress and go home. At fancier places, there might be a steam room or a sauna or a warmed resting bench, after which you can get back in for another soak, and you can keep a large towel in your locker if you don’t get dry enough with your washcloth. Some towns exist around these hot springs, and I’ve never been anywhere in Japan that doesn’t have them. Here in Kyoto there are a few in town, but we take our little train to the northern end of the line, out in the hills, where Kurama onsen lies among the tall pines, advertising that bathing in their mineral water heals what ails you, especially rheumatism, asthma, and muscular disorders. They have indoor baths, but we go to the outdoor ones, regardless of the weather, and have a good long soak whenever we like. Including the train ticket, it comes to around $15 a person for as much mineral hot springs as we can stand—after all, it doesn’t cost them anything to heat the water. THAT, as Martha would say, is a very good thing.

English in Japan: Especially since the USA occupied Japan after WWII, English has been an important part of Japanese. A century ago, when words like demokurashii (democracy) and saikoanarisusu (psychoanalysis) had a vogue among the intellectual elite, everyday vocabulary still came pretty much from the Japanese and Chinese words inherited from the past. Except for European foods like pan (“bread,” from Spanish or Portuguese) and kastera (“sponge cake,” again from Spanish or Portuguese), which had joined the lexicon way back. Unlike written Chinese, Japanese includes a phonetic writing system, so transliteration of useful foreign words makes a certain amount of sense. But nowadays, English words can be found everywhere, sometimes written in the Latin alphabet, sometimes in the katakana phonetic system (a special one for spelling out foreign words). A few years ago, Coca-Cola’s slogan for the Japan market was, “I feel Coke,” in English, plastered on every soft-drink machine in the country. Particular English words have special resonance with Japanese marketing folks—“happy,” “choice,” and “style” appear frequently—but even when a perfectly good Japanese word exists for something, very often the English word shows up instead. We’re snacking not on kawakashita budo (dried grapes) but on reizun (raisins); our friends drive around not in uchi no kuruma (our automobile) but in maikaa (my car). This could hardly be considered weird by an American, surrounded with pizza, sushi, hamburgers, and ketchup (all non-English words, after all, for non-local foods). A linguist friend who lives here thinks that it’s not only the utility of English words that attracts people—foreign words are just cooler than domestic words, and every Japanese student must take at least a few years of English, making ours the foreign language of choice. (There are exceptions, of course—“part-time work” is German arubaito, and one of our department stores is French biburei, or Vivre.) But the pleasure and flashiness of English makes good Japanese tori (chicken) turn into chikin, orthodox kekkonshiki (marriage ritual) into ueddingu, and a celebratory matsuri (festival) into a fueaa (fair). Our local greasy spoon might be a shokudo (dining hall) or a shokujisho (a place to eat), but nope, it’s a guriru (grill) or a resutoran. The quality of English in Japan has increased noticeably—the old jokes about “Japlish” don’t apply much any more—but I still feel a bit odd when I ask for an ichinichi joshaken (one-day pass) at the subway station, and the attendant replies, “Wan dei passu.” Or when I order our drinks at the counter, and the barrista shouts, “Burendo kohii, tsuu.” That is, blend coffee, two. Doesn’t Japanese have a good word for two, for goodness’ sake???

Jon’s Kyoto Miscellany

Curry rice: Folks here don’t have many local options for eating in the middle of the day—most everything you can get is called some variant of ranchi, the Japanese pronunciation of “lunch.” Convenience stores sell “mixed sandwiches,” which consist of fried meat or scrambled eggs, plus a few limp veggies, on bad white bread. The restaurants have thin noodles in soup (ramen), thick noodles in soup (udon), big rice bowls with all manner of things on top, rice-stuffed omelets decorated with ketchup…and curry rice (kareiraisu). Forget any connection to India, except the vaguest hint of turmeric or cumin. Curry rice consists of a lot of rice, usually on a plate, and a substantial scoopful of lightly flavored, thick, brown gravy poured over one side, never over all. The brown-white color contrast seems important in the presentation. A few forlorn chunks of beef or pork might languish in the goo, or you can get a thin piece of fried pork to sit atop the pile. But apart from some crunchy, peculiarly tasteless pickles, that’s it. You eat this with a soupspoon, not with chopsticks, and its vendors range from school cafeterias to specialty curry-rice restaurants where you can find exotica like curry-rice with fried squid or curry-rice and a hamburger or curry-rice and French fries. It’s unattractive, not especially tasty, not very nutritious—and nationally popular. Go figure. Worse yet, for reasons as yet undetermined, I love it. Ann (sensibly) won’t eat it, and who could blame her?

Public transportation: Everyone knows that Japan has a terrific public transportation system, and it’s true. We can get from anywhere to anywhere, in the Kyoto basin or beyond, by subway or train or bus, without inconvenience and with confidence that we will arrive on time. If the schedule says the subway leaves at 11:44 and takes 18 minutes to get to Shijo, that’s what happens. Even the buses run promptly, and none of it is insanely expensive—we get downtown, 20 minutes by subway or a little longer by bus, for a little more than $2 each way. Kyoto has public buses, several private bus companies, and a complex net of public and private railways. (Our outlying suburban neighborhood is served by a little privately owned train line that goes all the way from the city proper out into the hills, to a hot-springs resort far beyond the urban sprawl.) Bus drivers apologize to their passengers for taking a few extra seconds to edge out into traffic, train conductors apologize for keeping you waiting at every stop, and even the subway has an electronic announcer to inform you, in both Japanese and English, that the next stop will be Kitaoji and please don’t forget your umbrella. When we go a-touring, we take the comfortable, prompt, and usually convenient inter-city trains—we spent a week on the road this month, visited four cities and towns in southwestern Japan (a region roughly the size of the Boston-to-Philadelphia corridor), for about $300 apiece in train fares. Other railroad attractions: Train stations sell box lunches; vendors go up and down the aisles with chocolates, hot drinks, and beer; and everything’s clean. One foreigner’s gripe, though. Especially in town, the announcer never leaves you alone, not even for 30 seconds. There’s always something to say and someone saying it, at high volume and often in an annoying voice. (Both male and female public voices in Japanese can have a truly noxious, nasal, fingernails-on-blackboard quality.) But hey, that’s a small price to pay for a system that really works. We can always imitate the Kyoto kids—wear our headphones and listen to our iPods while we ride.

Fish: Whenever I mention that we live in Japan to non-Japanese folks, the first question is, “Can you survive on a diet of raw fish?” The answer, of course, is no, certainly not, and neither do Japanese people. However, raw fish does constitute a part of the diet—along with beef, pork, chicken, duck, cooked fish, endless pickled and fresh veggies, and vast quantities of rice and bread, among other things—so I guess it’s worth explaining. Since most of Japan is quite close to the ocean (no place more than about 80 miles), fish and other marine products form a crucial part of the local nutrition. Some inland folks have fresh-water sources, too. For anyone who lives away from the water (like the Kyotoites among whom we live, 40 km from the ocean), pickling, salting, and drying have long histories, but Really Fresh Fish has become a valued commodity. No better way to guarantee freshness than to serve the fish as soon as possible after removing it from the water! Thus, sashimi (a selection of raw fish) and some kinds of sushi. (Other types of sushi contain pickled or even cooked fish, eggs, tofu skin, etc.) But we’ve had wonderful cooked fish here, too—grilled, steamed, baked, stir-fried, poached, and sauced with everything from soy sauce to marinara.

Raw fish, some Japanese folks have discovered, is also a great way to gross out foreign guests, and so we have been served uncooked critters in some extreme forms—shrimp so recently skinned that they’re still twitching (odori-ebi, or “dancing shrimp”) or sashimi beautifully sliced then re-assembled so that the animal looks alive on the plate, even though it isn’t. In Hagi, a small fishing town, we even had a dish of paper-thin sliced fugu sashimi, the flesh of a blow-fish widely reknowned for its extremely toxic internal organs. This certainly can be off-putting, but the point is—raw fish doesn’t usually taste fishy! Its textures and tastes can vary widely, and even a very Euro-American palate can find it tasty, even wonderful. The fugu, for example, was quite delicate and lovely, and we found crab sashimi a lovely appetizer for a huge feast of crab stew.

For some more ordinary fish experiences, we recently visited Shinji Lake, near the north coast, which produces seven famous critters for the table—bass, carp, whitebait, shrimp, eel, a very delicate pike, and shijimi, a tiny clam-like shellfish. All are generally served cooked, in various ways, but some are also eaten raw, and all (except those that are preserved or vacuum packed for other parts of the country) are eaten on the day they are caught. First thing in the morning, the long narrow shijimi boats scoot out into the shallows, where the fishermen scrape the bottom with a long-handled basket, rinse the collected shellfish free of sand and muck, then deliver them to noisy markets, where restaurateurs, grocery-store buyers, and processing plants compete to buy them. We went to a tiny little bar-restaurant one evening in Matsue, on the shore of the lake, where Ann ordered the bass, steamed in thick local paper, and Jon had sashimi—a plate of raw fish, served with garnishes and thick soy sauce for dipping. To our surprise, none of the Seven Famous Fishes turned up on the sashimi plate—only aji, a tender pink-fleshed ocean fish, and (of all things) sazae, which my dictionary calls a “wreath shell.” The former tasted wonderfully non-fishy, sweet and delicate; the latter had the consistency of slightly crunchy pencil-erasers and tasted like iodine. You win some, you lose some. But we generally eat very well here, and so could a fastidious foreigner who refused raw fish—there’s always curry rice!!!

Western Honshu-First Day Hiroshima

We’re just back from a week touring the western end of this big island we live on. Everywhere we went, history is part of daily life, the political represented by the thousand year old castle on the highest, most visible hill in town, and the daily by ceramics crafted by twelfth generation potters. Each prefecture is proud of its own food products as well—fish and seafood or fruits and vegetables unique to the local area.

We started in Hiroshima. I really think that every American should make a pilgrimage to the Peace Park. It’s so powerful that I don’t know how to talk about it without diminishing its impact. The museum and park cover an enormous area of downtown close to ground zero, and everything about the installation is dedicated to the conviction that humanity cannot coexist with nuclear weapons. I can only give you a few snapshot impressions. I hope you can imagine more—or go yourself someday:

*Four walls covered with telegrams of protest sent by Hiroshima mayors to governments that have just tested nuclear bombs.

*Aerial views of the city before and after the bomb. Only a half-dozen buildings had even a few walls standing minutes after the bomb was dropped on this city of 350,000 people. One of these relics has been preserved; here’s a picture of the A-Bomb Dome.

*Tatters of clothing found by the parents of vaporized junior high school students who were out on the streets building fire lanes from City Hall so it could be saved if it was bombed (by conventional bombs.)

*Copies of letters and memos written by politicians and scientists in the U.S. as the decisions to first build, then when and where to use the bomb were made—long before the actual event. Chilling.

*Gazillions of paper cranes sent by children all over the world to contribute to the Children’s Peace Monument. The following from a Hiroshima website: “This connection between paper cranes and peace can be traced back to a young girl named Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia ten years after the atomic bombing.Sadako was two years old when she was exposed to the A-bomb. She had no apparent injuries and grew into a strong and healthy girl. However, nine years later in the fall when she was in the sixth grade of elementary school (1954), she suddenly developed signs of an illness. In February the following year she was diagnosed with leukemia and was admitted to the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital. Believing that folding paper cranes would help her recover, she kept folding them to the end, but on October 25, 1955, after an eight-month struggle with the disease, she passed away. Sadako's death triggered a campaign to build a monument to pray for world peace and the peaceful repose of the many children killed by the atomic bomb. The Children's Peace Monument that stands in Peace Park was built with funds donated from all over Japan. Later, this story spread to the world, and now, approximately 10 million cranes are offered each year before the Children's Peace Monument. ”

The rest of our tour was much cheerier than this. I’ll save it for the next installment.